Gil Toss Ability to drain gil out of the economy?

[Phenidate]

you can't say that people are being preyed on or idiots for making certain purchases. Sure marketing plays a big role, but everything comes down to what economists like to call Utility. You can think of utility as happiness points.
If you have $5000 you want to spend it in order to maximize your utility / happiness points.
If spending it on cleansing your soul with chi does that, then the service is legitimate. However you have to look at the opportunity cost of spending the $5000 on a cleansing. For example, maybe if you spent the $5000 on soliciting 'entertainment' instead, you may be happier.

If someone spends 50mil in game, gets an epic helmet that looks cool and is better than any other helmet in the game for a considerable period, and they are happy they got it. Then its beneficial both to the player and to the games economy.

The gil sinks in the game currently are no-where near enough to counteract the gil in existence. The best it is doing is balancing the current amount of gil in the economy.

And its marketing, not sales-people or showmen (IN GENERAL) that determine if a product is a success or not. And that ties directly into neuro-economics. If you know what makes humans happy (btw, scientifically proven that genetically we are interested in relative not absolute gains, meaning we want to have more or better stuff than others) then you can market a product well. A Gucci bag isnt about the bag, its about the status associated with the bag.

edit: Much like the status associated with e-peen gear in game.

My opinion of people throwing away money on garbage still stands. If you need to pay for status or spiritual freedom, there are better ways to go about it.

Go back and read the rest of my post because I already brought up the reason as to WHERE this massive influx of cash is likely coming from.

The number of botters and multi-boxers running around exploiting the present system of leve rewards has been rising steadily over the past couple weeks, from being an uncommon sighting to the present common occurrence.

Whats more, insane prices like your aforementioned 20million gil HNM drops is a serious symptom of poorly balanced gil sinks to gil adds, one of the contributing factors on why the economy was messed up in FFXI. Where is any single person going to farm that sort of money without a MASSIVE over dedication in time? There IS A REASON RMT ARE SUCCESSFUL. Why spend weeks of your time when you could just pay off some internet creep to give it to you after they hoarded it doing what ever TOS violating operation they run; be it botters, underpaid GIL farmers or multi-boxing to exploit rewards. Its crap like that 20million HNM drop that encourages it and makes such a business successful.

What is needed? Tweaks to existing gil sinks, more gil sinks which are REASONABLE and do not encourage large lump sums of gil. 100 gil here, 1000 there... Balance it against the frequency that players gain gil against the frequency these gil sinks are used, allowing for some accumulation of wealth (the rate of which is dependent on how much money has to be expended).

How this system is balanced dictates the amount of effort a player needs to invest to afford what they want. Raise the difficulty too say... the ridiculous difficulty of early FFXI and you make it too tempting and easy too just pay someone else too do it for you. Make it too easy and the value of money just becomes irrelevant after a certain point (such as in WOW where once you start raking in thousands of gil NPCing off greys or what have you, there is very little left to do with it other than just pass it around. There is a reason Blizzard started to add random junk like pets and novelty items costing hundreds of gold, there isn't much else they can add without making the barrier to entry to high for some via classic gil sinks)

The point is, take too heavy handed and over zealous an approach to this problem and you have the same stupid mistakes we've seen in the past such as our lack of a decent way to exchange goods. Boy, that sure shut down the RMT didn't it? Pay no attention to the 16 lalafell running by with vowel-less names and eerily mechanical movements folks.

Your solution is the equivalent of a nuke where a scalpel is needed.

[Azurymber]

My opinion of people throwing away money on garbage still stands. If you need to pay for status or spiritual freedom, there are better ways to go about it.

Go back and read the rest of my post because I already brought up the reason as to WHERE this massive influx of cash is likely coming from.

The number of botters and multi-boxers running around exploiting the present system of leve rewards has been rising steadily over the past couple weeks, from being an uncommon sighting to the present common occurrence.

Whats more, insane prices like your aforementioned 20million gil HNM drops is a serious symptom of poorly balanced gil sinks to gil adds, one of the contributing factors on why the economy was messed up in FFXI. Where is any single person going to farm that sort of money without a MASSIVE over dedication in time? There IS A REASON RMT ARE SUCCESSFUL. Why spend weeks of your time when you could just pay off some internet creep to give it to you after they hoarded it doing what ever TOS violating operation they run; be it botters, underpaid GIL farmers or multi-boxing to exploit rewards. Its crap like that 20million HNM drop that encourages it and makes such a business successful.

What is needed? Tweaks to existing gil sinks, more gil sinks which are REASONABLE and do not encourage large lump sums of gil. 100 gil here, 1000 there... Balance it against the frequency that players gain gil against the frequency these gil sinks are used, allowing for some accumulation of wealth (the rate of which is dependent on how much money has to be expended).

How this system is balanced dictates the amount of effort a player needs to invest to afford what they want. Raise the difficulty too say... the ridiculous difficulty of early FFXI and you make it too tempting and easy too just pay someone else too do it for you. Make it too easy and the value of money just becomes irrelevant after a certain point (such as in WOW where once you start raking in thousands of gil NPCing off greys or what have you, there is very little left to do with it other than just pass it around. There is a reason Blizzard started to add random junk like pets and novelty items costing hundreds of gold, there isn't much else they can add without making the barrier to entry to high for some via classic gil sinks)

The point is, take too heavy handed and over zealous an approach to this problem and you have the same stupid mistakes we've seen in the past such as our lack of a decent way to exchange goods. Boy, that sure shut down the RMT didn't it? Pay no attention to the 16 lalafell running by with vowel-less names and eerily mechanical movements folks.

Your solution is the equivalent of a nuke where a scalpel is needed.

RMT have nothing in this game.... Leves don't give out good enough awards anymore so thats out for them. Now all they can really do is fish bot and craft bot and that doesn't generate influx's of gil but rather just transfers gil around. Further the market for gil in this game is so small they have very few RMT working it since they won't make much of a profit....

[Phenidate]

RMT have nothing in this game.... Leves don't give out good enough awards anymore so thats out for them. Now all they can really do is fish bot and craft bot and that doesn't generate influx's of gil but rather just transfers gil around. Further the market for gil in this game is so small they have very few RMT working it since they won't make much of a profit....

And we're back to this poor understanding of the scale RMT is operating on.

Here's what I've seen over the last few days:
http://randomyandere.imgur.com/rmt_bots/all

If these leves give so little, they seem to disagree. Leves around Nophica typically pay out 3 to 8k depending on the leve, time completion and difficulty.

Assuming they are picking up equivalent leves here and elsewhere, and it is JUST THIS GROUP they are running, at worse they are netting 192,000 gil (assuming 3k average per leve) for 7 bots and the ringleader doing their 8 leves. Trading in the right leves on ones that already give about 7 or 8k? We're looking at around 512k gil generated for THIS GROUP.

As far as crafting? Take Jellyfish Humors as an example. About 8 synths earns you 13,440gil. With 3 crafters they are making 41,580 gil in 1/3 the the time it would take us to do the same. Add in the fact that this particular trio of bots has been at it for about 2 weeks non stop?

Feel free to check my math.

Assume it takes a (generous) 10 minutes to finish a stack. 3 bots crafting 336 hours straight. If they produce just 6 stacks an hour a piece? 9,313,920 gil.

But wait, HOW are they getting all these jelly fish humours? Not hard. Cassie hollow and the Jelly islands near Bloodshore? Tons of jellies that quickly respawn and are farmed for the Humours and Cnida. (The last series of bots have apparently been banned because they are finally gone after a week. Who knows how much mats they offloaded in that time though?)

No one seems to care enough to figure out how many of these groups there are, nor any idea who these bots belong to. They keep popping up and the only response anyone seems to give to this is "LOL it doesn't matter the game has no economy."

Man, everyone is gonna hate it when we do get one going and all these bots suddenly become a major problem. They don't keep that gil for themselves, they are selling it to lazy players looking for a quick way to pick up a couple million. Tell me, Miss Economist? What are these players going to do with this money exactly?

If it ends up going this way, then yeah, throwing away 10 million gil at our problems will be about the only way to solve this problem.

[Azurymber]

And we're back to this poor understanding of the scale RMT is operating on.

Here's what I've seen over the last few days:
http://randomyandere.imgur.com/rmt_bots/all

If these leves give so little, they seem to disagree. Leves around Nophica typically pay out 3 to 8k depending on the leve, time completion and difficulty.

Assuming they are picking up equivalent leves here and elsewhere, and it is JUST THIS GROUP they are running, at worse they are netting 192,000 gil (assuming 3k average per leve) for 7 bots and the ringleader doing their 8 leves. Trading in the right leves on ones that already give about 7 or 8k? We're looking at around 512k gil generated for THIS GROUP.

As far as crafting? Take Jellyfish Humors as an example. About 8 synths earns you 13,440gil. With 3 crafters they are making 41,580 gil in 1/3 the the time it would take us to do the same. Add in the fact that this particular trio of bots has been at it for about 2 weeks non stop?

Feel free to check my math.

Assume it takes a (generous) 10 minutes to finish a stack. 3 bots crafting 336 hours straight. If they produce just 6 stacks an hour a piece? 9,313,920 gil.

But wait, HOW are they getting all these jelly fish humours? Not hard. Cassie hollow and the Jelly islands near Bloodshore? Tons of jellies that quickly respawn and are farmed for the Humours and Cnida. (The last series of bots have apparently been banned because they are finally gone after a week. Who knows how much mats they offloaded in that time though?)

No one seems to care enough to figure out how many of these groups there are, nor any idea who these bots belong to. They keep popping up and the only response anyone seems to give to this is "LOL it doesn't matter the game has no economy."

Man, everyone is gonna hate it when we do get one going and all these bots suddenly become a major problem. They don't keep that gil for themselves, they are selling it to lazy players looking for a quick way to pick up a couple million. Tell me, Miss Economist? What are these players going to do with this money exactly?

If it ends up going this way, then yeah, throwing away 10 million gil at our problems will be about the only way to solve this problem.

1. even choosing the best leves they make nowhere near that amount anymore.
2.so they sell the stuff they craft from a jelly fish w/e to an npc? how much does each npc for o_O